[roenxi]

> Yet every democracy seems to tend toward dictatorships according to history.

How could a democracy end if not dictatorship? I suppose sinking beneath the waves is an alternative, but that is pretty rare.

If you want to have some fun reading up on Wikipedia's list of Empires [0], take some time to appreciate that the Republic of Venice being the longest-lived Western European empire. And I'm no expert in Venetian history (especially being as they have so much of it), but it seems to have had some solid democratic elements for around 700 years.

Democracies have a messy, difficult to categorise staying power. I hear stories about Kings and Emperors, but nobody talks about the enduring-like-weeds powers that don't have neatly defined figureheads but are hotbeds of prosperity. Look at Switzerland working through the World Wars for example. Really a minor miracle at that time in that place.

And world's largest empire (the British) spawned numerous highly successful democracies.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_empires

[andrepd]

Venice wasn't a democracy in any meaningful way, either in the style of Greek democracy that preceded it or western liberal democracies that succeeded them. It was an oligarchy with limited democratic elements.

[roenxi]

Well, sure. But the Athenian-style Greek democracies were such an outrageous success that they're still a part of the common political discourse after 2,500 years and we still have things to learn from the stories they left us. I mean, not every democracy is going to achieve that level of success or quite that place in the public imagination.

What Venice had was pretty good compared to dictatorship.

[oscardssmith]

It's worth noting that the popular conception of "Greek democracy" tends to ignore the massive caste of slaves that Greek city states had.

[Zachsa999]

Tell me again how this applies to user privacy concerns?

[baybal2]

> Democracies have a messy, difficult to categorise staying power. I hear stories about Kings and Emperors, but nobody talks about the enduring-like-weeds powers that don't have neatly defined figureheads but are hotbeds of prosperity.

Don't look around for long.

United States of America — a truly improbable, impossible country. With so much of s**t going on through its history, any other normal country would've crashed, and burned 20 times over.